The small business cycle
Just when you thought you had it all, life punches you square in the jaw. The Cycle. Boom and bust. Growth and decay. Women know all about it. But ask a guy and he will tell you “The Dow’s going to 20,000 by 2009!”1
I believe in synchronicity. Yesterday, I experienced another small example:
1) As noted recently, we’ve streamlined our working week to set aside Fridays for working ON the business.
2) As part of Autopsy 2, we have all accepted personal responsibility for a range of tactically-focused projects designed to deliver “quick wins” within the scope of our current levels of competence.
3) Hence, just yesterday (Friday) we had a number of meetings organised by a couple of different people as part of their role in gathering input & stimulating discussion in their areas of responsibility.
None of the meetings were outstanding, in terms of the input received, or outcomes generated.
So it was a very welcome point of input to open Scott Berkun’s book “Making things Happen” at the place I had last left off (p206), and read the following: read more »
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For those who have been regular readers of the blog, you will realise, by now, that I am a keen advocate of life-long-learning, and improvement (both for individuals within our company, and for the company as a whole).
Given we are fast approaching our 10th birthday, and that we have disappointed ourselves in terms of a number of key initiatives, it has been timely to spend some focused time on introspection.
Back on Tuesday 28th July 2009 we held Autopsy 1, which was a one-day planning session in our offices in Milton.
During the day we dissected the company (as best we were able in the single day) and drew out of this a number of changes that were required.
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One of our central focuses back in our Business Autopsy in July (which we’re now starting to think of as Autopsy 1 - as distinct from the current Autopsy 2), was the fact that our software development processes were not up-to-scratch. read more »
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Paul Klaptocz pointed me at this interesting blog post from Stephen Few entitled “Malcolm Gladwell, modern problems, and the analytics age”.
With us having read two of his books many months ago (Blink and the Tipping Point – sorry, no book reviews up yet) and having previously discussed the follow-on from his 3rd book (Outliers) in my post about the 10,000-hour rule, I was curious to read further. read more »
Not sure where I first heard about this book, but it has been one of a number that have sat in our bookshelf for a while (we run a quasi-LIFO reading line).
Something prompted me to pick it up, and I am grateful I did.
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The Book |
What we thought |
 “Simply a Great Manager” |
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A useful slant on uncommon “common sense” |
| Full Disclosure – yes, that’s a tracked link to Amazon shown above. We buy quite a large number of books on a wide range of topics, all relevant to our business in some way. If you did happen to purchase the book from Amazon, they’d throw a few shekels our way, which would help us to buy (and hence publish reviews of) even more books. Hence, Karma would return the benefits to you… |